FLAME THROWERS

WHY THE HEATED BURSTS ON YOUR COMPUTER NETWORK?

"You are a thin-skinned reactionary jerk," begins the computer message sent from
one highly educated professional to another. "I will tell you this, buster. If
you were close enough and you called me that, you'd be picking up your teeth in
a heartbeat." There follows an obscene three-word suggestion in screaming
capital letters.

The writer of the above message, sent over the Byte Information Exchange, was
apparently enraged after a sarcasm he'd sent earlier was misinterpreted as
racist. In the argot of computers, his response was a "flame"-a rabid, abusive.
or otherwise overexuberant outburst sent via computer. In networking's early
days, its advocates promised a wonderful new world of pure mind-to-mind,
speed-of-light electronic conversation. What networkers today often find
instead are brusque putdowns, off-color puns, and screenfuls of anonymous
gripes. The computer seems to be acting as a collective Rorschach test. In the
privacy of their cubicles office workers are firing off spontaneous salvos of
overheated prose.

Sara Kiesler, a social psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Lee
Sproull, a Boston University sociologist, have observed that networking can make
otherwise reasonable people act brash. In studies originally designed to judge
the efficiency of computerized decision making, they gave small groups of
students a deadline to solve a problem. Groups either talked together in a room
or communicated via isolated computer terminals. The face-to-face groups
reported no undue friction. The computerized sessions frequently broke down
into bickering and name-calling. In one case, invective escalated into physical
threats. "We had to stop the experiment and escort the students out of the
building separately," Kiesler recalls. Kiesler and Sproull documented a
tendency toward flaming on corporate electronic-mail systems as well. At one
large company, employees cited an average of 33 flames a month over the E-mail
system; comparable outbursts in face-to-face meetings occurred about four times
a month.

Kiesler and Sproull attribute the phenomenon largely to the absence of cues
normally guiding a conversation-a listener's nod or raised eyebrows. "With a
computer," Kiesler says, "there's nothing to remind you there are real humans on
the other end of the wire." Messages become overemphatic-all caps to signify a
shout; "(smile)" or a sideways happy face, to mean "I'm kidding." Anonymity
makes flaming worse, she says, by creating the electronic equivalent of "a tribe
of masked and robed individuals."

In real life, what we say is tempered by when and where we say it. A remark
where lights are low and colleagues tipsy might not be phrased the same under
fluorescent lights on Monday morning. But computerized messages may be read
days later and by hundreds or thousands of readers. Flaming's ornery side is
only half the picture, says Sproull, who coauthored Connections: New Ways of
Working in the Networked Organization with Kiesler. "People on networks feel
freer to express more enthusiasm and positive excitement as well as socially
undesirable behavior," she says. Sproull finds it ironic that computers are
viewed as symbols of cool, impersonal efficiency. "What's fascinating is the
extent' to which they elicit deeply emotional behaviors. We're not talking
about zeros and ones. People reveal their innermost souls or type obscenities
about the boss." What, she asks, could be more human?